The St. John below is much like a broad and placid lake flowing through a pastoral country, having long tributary lakes and bays, including the extensive and attractive Kennebecasis, which is the favorite rural resort of the St. John people and the scene of their aquatic sports. The river farther down broadens into Grand Bay, and then passing the narrow gorge of the "reversible cataract," makes the expansive harbor of St. John, and is ultimately swallowed up by the Bay of Fundy.

ANNAPOLIS AND MINAS BASINS.

From St. John River across the Bay of Fundy to Digby Gut in Nova Scotia is forty-five miles. For one hundred and thirty miles, the North Mountain Ridge, elevated six hundred feet, stretches along the bay upon the Nova Scotia shore, sharply notched down at Digby Gut, the entrance to Annapolis Basin. This strait, barely a half-mile wide, is cut two miles through the mountain ridge, having a tidal current of six miles an hour, and within is a magnificent salt-water lake, surrounded by forests sloping up the hillsides, and one of the pleasantest sheets of water in the world. It is no wonder that De Monts, when his colonists abandoned the dreary island in St. Croix River, sought refuge here, and that his companion, Baron de Poutrincourt, obtained a grant for the region. It is one of the most attractive parts of Acadia, and as the old song has it:

Digby is within the Gut, fronted by a long and tall wooden wharf that has to deal with fifty feet of tide, its end being an enormous square timber crib, built up like a four-story house. The town is noted for luscious cherries and for "Digby Chickens," the most prized brand of herrings cured by the "Blue-noses," and it has also developed into quite an attractive watering-place. To the southwestward a railway runs to Yarmouth, at the western extremity of Nova Scotia, a small but very busy port, having steamer lines in various directions. To the northeastward Annapolis Basin stretches sixteen miles between the enclosing hills, gradually narrowing towards the extremity. Here, on the lowlands adjoining Annapolis River, is the quaint little town of Annapolis Royal and the extensive ramparts of the ancient fort that guarded it, covering some thirty acres. This was the original French capital of Acadia, and the first permanent settlement made by Europeans in America north of St. Augustine, De Monts founding the colony in 1605. He named it Port Royal, but the English Puritans a century later changed this, in honor of their "good Queen Anne," to Annapolis Royal. Almost from the first settlement to the final capture by the Puritan expedition from Boston in 1710, its history was a tale of battles, sieges and captures by many chieftains of the rival nations. As the Marquis of Lorne in his Canadian book describes it: "This is the story which is repeated with varying incidents through all the long-drawn coasts of the old Acadia. We see, first, the forest village of the Red Indians, with its stockades and patches of maize around it; then the landing from the ships, under the white flag sown with golden lilies, of armored arquebussiers and spearsmen; the skirmishing and the successful French settlement; to be followed by the coming of other ships, with the red cross floating over the high-built sterns, and then the final conflict and the victory of the British arms." Now everything is peaceful, and the people raise immense crops of the most attractive apples for shipment to Europe.

East of Annapolis is the "Garden of Nova Scotia." The long ridge of the North Mountain on the coast screens it from the cold winds and fogs, while the parallel ridge of the South Mountain stretches for eighty miles, and between these noble ranges, which are described as "most gracefully moulded," is a broad and rich intervale extending to the Basin of Minas and the land of Evangeline, which Longfellow has made so sadly poetical. Good crops of hay grow on the fertile red soils, which the farmers gather with their slowly-plodding ox-teams; and of this region the poet sang mournfully:

To-day, however, "the murmuring pines and the hemlocks" are not there, excepting in stunted growth in occasional thickets, the land being meadow and grain fields, with many orchards. Upon a low-lying peninsula, washed by the placid waters of the Basin of Minas, is the "Great Meadow," the Grand Pré of the unfortunate Acadians, where in that early time they had reclaimed from the enormous tides some three square miles of land, while south of the meadow, on somewhat higher ground, was their little village. Beyond it the dark North Mountain ridge stretches to the promontory of Cape Blomidon, dropping off abruptly six hundred feet into the Basin of Minas. The contented French lived secluded lives here, avoiding much of the ravages of the wars raging elsewhere around the Bay of Fundy, and when France ceded Nova Scotia to England in 1713 they numbered about two thousand. They took the oaths of loyalty to the British crown, but in the subsequent French and Indian wars there was much disaffection, and it was determined in 1755 to remove all the French who lived around the Bay of Fundy, numbering some eight thousand, so that a loyal British population might replace them. In September the embarkation began from Grand Pré, one hundred and sixty young men being ordered aboard ship. They slowly marched from the church to the shore between ranks of the women and children, who, kneeling, prayed for blessings upon them, they also praying and weeping and singing hymns. The old men were sent next, but the wives and children were kept till other ships arrived. These wretched people were herded together near the sea, without proper food, raiment or shelter for weeks, until the transports came, and it was December before the last of them had embarked. In one locality a hundred men fled to the woods, and soldiers were sent to hunt them, often shooting them down. Many in various places managed to escape, some getting to St. John River, while not a few went to Quebec, and others found refuge in Indian wigwams in the forests. There were seven thousand, however, carried on shipboard from the Bay of Fundy to the various British colonies from New Hampshire to Georgia, being landed without resources and having generally to subsist on charity. To prevent their returning, all the French villages around the Bay of Fundy were laid waste and their homes ruined. In the Minas district two hundred and fifty houses and a larger number of barns were burnt. Edmund Burke in the British Parliament cried out against this treatment, saying: "We did, in my opinion, most inhumanly, and upon pretences that, in the eye of an honest man, are not worth a farthing, root out this poor, innocent, deserving people, whom our utter inability to govern or to reconcile gave us no sort of right to extirpate." The sad story of Grand Pré and of Evangeline was historic before Longfellow's day, but he made it immortal.

MINAS TO HALIFAX.

The Basin of Minas, in the Micmac Indian tradition, was the beaver-pond and favorite abiding-place of their divinity, Glooscap. On the great promontory of Cape Blomidon, which stretches northward to enclose the Basin on its western side, he had his home. The ridge of the cape turns sharply to the westward and ends in Cape Split, alongside the Minas Channel. This formation has been compared to the curved handle of a huge walking-stick, the long North Mountain stretching far away being the stick. The Micmacs tell us that this ridge, now bent around to the westward, was Glooscap's beaver-dam, which he beneficently swung open, so that the surplus waters might run out and not overflow the meadows around the Basin of Minas. In swinging it around, however, the terminal cliff of Cape Split was broken off, and now rises in a promontory four hundred feet high just beyond the main ridge. Glooscap, we are told, began a conflict in the Basin with the Great Beaver, and threw at him the five vast rocks now known as the Five Islands on the northern shore to the eastward of Parrsboro'. The Beaver was chased out of the Basin, westward through the Minas Channel, and as a parting salute Glooscap threw his kettle at him, which overturning, became Spencer's Island, on the northern shore beyond Cape Split. The enormous tides run through the Minas Channel at eight miles an hour, and they helped to drive the Great Beaver over to St. John, where Glooscap finally conquered and killed him.

The formation around the head of the Bay of Fundy is largely of rich and fertile red lowlands, marsh and meadow, much of it being reclaimed by dyking. The same formation is carried over the Chignecto isthmus, east of the bay, where the Nova Scotia Peninsula is joined to the mainland. This is only seventeen miles wide, and across it has been projected the "Chignecto Ship Railway," designed to shorten by about five hundred miles the passage of vessels around the Nova Scotia Peninsula into the St. Lawrence. It is a system of railway tracks on which the design was to carry ships over the isthmus. Vessels of two thousand tons were to be lifted out of the water, placed in a huge cradle, and drawn across by locomotives. The project, estimated as costing $5,000,000, was stopped in partial completion for want of funds. On the meadow land to the southward of the Basin of Minas is Windsor on the Avon, a small shipping town, in which the most famous building near the river is a broad and oddly-constructed one-story house, called the Clifton Mansion, which was the home of the author of Sam Slick—Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, a native of Windsor, who died in 1865. Beyond is Ardoise Mountain, rising seven hundred feet and having on its northern verge the great Aylesford sand-plain whereof Sam Slick says: "Plain folks call it, in a gin'ral way, the Devil's Goose Pasture. It is thirteen miles long and seven miles wide; it ain't just drifting sands, but it's all but that, it's so barren. It's uneven or wavy, like the swell of the sea in a calm, and it's covered with short, thin, dry, coarse grass, and dotted here and there with a half-starved birch and a stunted, misshapen spruce. It is just about as silent and lonesome and desolate a place as you would wish to see. All that country thereabout, as I have heard tell when I was a boy, was once owned by the Lord, the king and the devil. The glebe-lands belonged to the first, the ungranted wilderness-lands to the second, and the sand-plain fell to the share of the last—and people do say the old gentleman was rather done in the division, but that is neither here nor there—and so it is called to this day the Devil's Goose Pasture." Over this sand-plain and the rocky, desolate ridge beyond, runs the great railway train of the Provinces, on the route between St. John and Halifax—dignified by the title of the "Flying Bluenose." It crosses the bleak flanks of Ardoise Mountain and Mount Uniacke, with its gold mines, through a region which the local chronicler describes as having "admirable facilities for the pasturage of goats and the procuring of ballast for breakwaters;" and then comes to the pleasant shores of Bedford Basin, running several miles along its beautiful western bank down to Halifax harbor.

THE GREAT BRITISH-AMERICAN FORTRESS.

The city of Halifax is the stronghold of British power in North America, and is said to be, with the exception of Gibraltar, the best fortified outpost of the British empire. It is a fortress and naval station of magnificent development upon an unrivalled harbor. This is an arm of the sea, thrust for sixteen miles up into the land, and the Indians called it Chebucto, meaning the "chief haven." A thousand ships can be accommodated on its spacious anchorages. Its Northwest Arm, a narrow waterway opening on the western shore just inside the entrance, makes a long peninsula with water on either side, which in the centre rises into Citadel Hill, two hundred and fifty-six feet high. Upon its eastern slopes, running down to the harbor and spreading two or three miles along it, is the narrow and elongated town, having the Queen's Dockyard at the northern end. Covering the broad hilltop is the spacious granite Citadel of Fort George, its green slopes, covered with luxuriant grass, being now devoted to the peaceful usefulness of a cow-pasture. Along the harbor and across in the suburb of Dartmouth are the streets and buildings of the town, containing forty thousand people. To the southward is the modern green-covered Fort Charlotte on St. George's Island, commanding the entrance and looking not unlike a sugar-loaf hat, and both shores are lined with powerful batteries and forts that make the position impregnable. The Citadel was begun by the Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father, when he commanded the British forces in Canada in the latter part of the eighteenth century, and it has since been enlarged and strengthened. At the entrance gate, grim memorials of the past, are mounted two old mortars, captured at the downfall of Louisbourg, on Cape Breton, in 1758.

Halifax did not have an early settlement, though in the Colonial times the French came into Chebucto to refit their ships. The Massachusetts Puritans, who had long been fighting the French and Indians, first recognized its importance, and in 1748 they sent a petition to Parliament urging the establishment of a post there, and $200,000 was voted for a colonizing expedition, of which the English "Lords of Trade," George Montagu, Earl of Halifax, being the chief, took charge, hoping for commercial as well as military advantage. Lord Edward Cornwallis commanded the expedition, which brought twenty-five hundred colonists, largely disbanded soldiers, into Chebucto, landing June 21, 1749, and founding Halifax, named in honor of the Chief Lord of Trade. They were soon attacked by the French and Indians, the suburbs being burnt, and they were harassed in many ways, leading to the erection of stockades and forts for defense; but they held the place, and it was the control of this fine harbor which finally enabled the British to secure Canada. The fleets and armies were concentrated here that took and destroyed the famous fortress of Louisbourg, which, with Quebec, held the Dominion for the French, and here was also organized the subsequent expedition under Wolfe that captured Quebec and ended a century and a half of warfare by the cession of Canada to England. In the American Revolution, Halifax was a chief base of the British operations, and when that war ended, large numbers of American loyalists exiled themselves to Halifax. There is now maintained a garrison of two thousand men and a strong fleet at Halifax, and the sailor and the soldier are picturesque features of the streets. The city has pleasant parks and suburbs, but everything is subordinated to the grim necessities of the fortress, although in all its noted career Halifax has never been the scene of actual warfare.

The Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia is indented by numerous bays that are good harbors, most of them having small towns and fishery stations. The western portal of Halifax harbor is Chebucto Head and Cape Sambro, with dangerous shoals beyond. There have been many serious wrecks in steering for this entrance during fogs, one of the most awful being the loss of the steamship "Atlantic" in 1873, when five hundred and thirty-five persons were drowned. Westward from Sambro are the broad St. Margaret's and Mahone Bays, and beyond, Lunenburg on its spacious harbor, a shipping and fishery town of four thousand people. To the westward are Bridgewater, Liverpool and Shelburne, with Cape Sable Island at the southwestern extremity of Nova Scotia, having behind it Barrington within a deep harbor. Off shore is Seal Island, with its great white guiding light, this being called, from its position, the "Elbow of the Bay of Fundy," and then around the "Elbow" is reached the broad estuary of the Tusket River and the beautiful archipelago of the Tusket Islands. The Tusket is one of the noted angling and sporting districts of the Province, this river draining a large part of the lake region of southwestern Nova Scotia, and having a succession of lakes connected by rapids and carrying a large amount of water down to the sea. There are eighty of these lakes of varying sizes. The salmon in the spring run up numerously, and the trout seek the cool recesses of the forests, while the rapids, the many islands and the charming woodlands are all attractive. In the archipelago of the estuary are some three hundred islands, the group extending out into the sea and having the powerful tidal currents flowing through their tortuous passages with the greatest velocity. These islands vary from small and barren rocks up to larger ones rising grandly from the water and thickly covered with trees, the channels between being narrow and deep. Among these islands are some of the best lobster fisheries in America.

Eastward from Halifax are more deep bays and good harbors, but the shores are only sparsely peopled, being mostly a wilderness yet to be permanently occupied, though the venturesome fishermen have their huts dropped about in pleasant nooks. Here are Musquidoboit and Ship harbors, with Sherbrooke village in Isaac's harbor. Beyond, the long projecting peninsula of Guysborough terminates in the famous Cape Canso, the eastern extremity of Nova Scotia. This peninsula was named in honor of Sir Guy Carleton, and has the deep indentation of Chedabucto Bay on its northern side. Here is a village of a few hundred sailors and fishermen, where the French had a fort in the seventeenth century, until the Puritans under Sir William Phips came from Boston in 1690, drove them out and burnt it. Off this coast and ninety miles out at sea to the southward is the dreaded Sable Island, a long and narrow sandspit without trees, producing nothing but salt grass and cranberries. A lighthouse stands at either end, and there are three flagstaffs for signals at intervals between them, with also a life-saving station, and the bleaching bones of many a wreck imbedded in the sands. It has few visitors, excepting those who are cast away, and everyone avoids it. Yet, strangely enough, the first American explorers were infatuated with the idea of planting a colony on this bleak and barren sandbar, and its history has mainly been a record of wrecks. Cabot originally saw this island, and in 1508 the first futile attempt was made to settle it, the colony being soon abandoned, though some live-stock were left there. Sir Humphrey Gilbert in 1583 lost his ship "Delight" here, with a hundred men, and going home on her consort, he lost his own life on the Azores. It was on this fateful voyage that Sir Humphrey, on his storm-tossed vessel "Squirrel," sweeping past the other, shouted to her crew: "Courage, my lads, we are as near Heaven by sea as by land." In 1598 a colony of forty French convicts was placed on the island and forgotten for seven years, when they were hunted up and twelve survivors found, whom the King pardoned, and they were then carried back to France dressed in seal-skins and described as "gaunt, squalid and long-bearded." This seems to have ended the attempts to colonize Sable Island. The Spaniards sent out an expedition to settle Cape Breton, but the fleet was dashed to pieces on this island. The great French Armada, sailing to punish the Puritans for capturing Louisbourg, suffered severely on its shoals. The French afterwards lost there the frigate "L'Africaine," and later the steamer "Georgia" was wrecked. It is a long, narrow island, bent in the form of a bow, spreading twenty-six miles including the terminating bars, and nowhere over a mile wide. A long, shallow lake extends for thirteen miles in the centre. There is the French Garden, the traditionary spot where the convicts suffered during their exile, and a graveyard where the shipwrecked are buried. Wild ponies gallop about, the descendants of those left by the first settlers, seals bask on the sands, and ducks swim the lake. Such to-day is Sable Island.

PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND.

From Halifax a railroad leads northward across Nova Scotia to Pictou. It passes through the gold-digging regions of Waverley, Oldham and Renfrew, then over the rich red soils of the head of the Bay of Fundy and down the Shubenacadie River, meaning the "place of wild potatoes," and reaches Truro, an active manufacturing town of over five thousand people near the head of Cobequid Bay. Beyond, through forests and hills, it crosses the peninsula to the Pictou coal-fields and comes out on Northumberland Strait at Pictou harbor. The coal is sent here for shipment, the name having come from the Indian word Pictook, meaning "bubbling or gas exploding," in allusion to the boiling of the waters near the coal-beds. Over across the Strait is Prince Edward Island, its red bluff shores along the edge of the horizon surmounted by a fringe of green foliage. The Micmacs recognized its peculiarity, calling it Epayquit, or "Anchored on the Wave." It is one hundred and thirty miles long and rather narrow, having deep bays, sometimes almost bisecting the island. The surface is low and undulating, with fertile soils mostly derived from the old red sandstone. The French first called it the Isle de St. Jean, but after the cession to England an effort was made to call it New Ireland, as Nova Scotia was New Scotland, and finally in 1800 it was given the present name in honor of Queen Victoria's father. It raises horses, oats, eggs and potatoes, and relatively to size is the best populated of all the Maritime Provinces. Charlottetown, inside of Hillsborough Bay,—called popularly "Ch-town," for short,—is the capital, a quiet place with about eleven thousand population, the Parliament House being its best building. A narrow-gauge railway is constructed through the island, near its western terminal being Summerside, on Bedeque Bay, where there is a little trade and three thousand people, probably its most active port.

THE ARM OF GOLD.

The eastern boundary of Nova Scotia is the Canso Strait, separating it from Cape Breton Island. At Canso, its southern entrance, various Atlantic cables are landed, while others go off southward to New York. This strait is a picturesque waterway, fifteen miles long and about a mile wide, a highway of commerce for the shipping desirous of avoiding the long passage around Cape Breton, and it is called by its admirers "The Golden Gate of the St. Lawrence Gulf." The geologists describe it as a narrow transverse valley excavated by the powerful currents of the drift period. As it leads directly from the Atlantic Ocean into the Gulf, more vessels are said to pass it than any other strait excepting Gibraltar. It has several villages upon the shores, mainly with Scottish inhabitants, the chief being Port Hawkesbury, Port Mulgrave and Port Hastings, the latter a point for gypsum export. Cape Breton Island is about one hundred miles long and eighty miles wide, its greatest natural feature being the famous "Arm of Gold," thus named in admiration by the early French explorers. Nearly one-half the surface of the island is occupied by the lakes and swamps of this "Bras d'Or," an extensive and almost tideless inland sea of salt water, ramifying with deep bays and long arms through the centre, having two large openings into the sea at its northeastern end, and almost communicating with the Atlantic on its southwestern corner. This "Arm of Gold" has fine scenery, and presents within the rocky confines of the island a large lake, the Great Bras d'Or, where the mariner gets almost out of sight of land. To the southward of Cape Breton Island is Arichat, or the Isle Madame, having the Lennox Passage between, this Isle being inhabited by a colony of French Acadian fishermen. Originally this region was colonized by the Count de Fronsac, Sieur Denys, the first French Governor of Cape Breton, in whose honor they always called the Canso Strait the Passage Fronsac, though since then its present title was adopted, being derived from the Micmac name of Camsoke, meaning "facing the frowning cliffs." Each little French settlement here, as on the St. Lawrence, has the white cottages clustering around the church with the tall spire, and the curé's house not far away, usually the most elaborate in the settlement. From the Lennox Passage a short canal has been cut through the rocks into the southwestern extremity of the Bras d'Or, thus actually dividing Cape Breton into two islands.

The village of "St. Peter at the Gate" is passed, and the lake entered at St. Peter's Inlet, a beautiful waterway filled with islands making narrow winding channels. Several of these islands are a Government reservation for a remnant of the Micmacs, and they have a small white church upon Chapel Island, where they gather from all parts of Cape Breton for their annual festival on St. Anne's Day. Beyond, the Great Bras d'Or broadens, an inland sea, the opposite shore almost out of vision, for the lake is eighteen miles across and fully fifty miles long. The banks come together at the Grand Narrows, making the contracted Strait of Barra, and then they expand again into another lake, neither so long nor so wide, the Little Bras d'Or to the northeastward, but still nearly fifty miles long, including its northeastern prolongation of St. Andrew Channel. This in turn opens by a wider strait into yet another lake to the northward, upon the farther shore of which is Baddeck. To the westward this lake spreads into St. Patrick's Channel, and to the northeastward there are thrust out in parallel lines the two "Arms of Gold" connecting with the sea. An island over thirty miles long and varying in width separates these two curious arms. These strangely-fashioned lakes present varied scenery; the shores in some places are low meadows, in others gently-swelling hills, and elsewhere they rise into forest-clad mountains. In the pellucid waters swim jelly-fish of exquisite tints. The atmosphere blends the outlines and colors so well that it smoothes the roughness of the wilder regions, and casts a softness over the scene which adds to its charms. Beyond the bordering mountains, to the northward, is a dreary and almost uninhabited table-land stretching to the Atlantic Ocean, where the long projection of remote Cape North stands in silent grandeur within seventy-five miles of Newfoundland.

Upon the verge of the northern Bras d'Or Lake, in a charming situation, is the little town of Baddeck, its houses scattered over the sloping hillsides and the church spires rising among the trees. A pretty island stands out in front as a protective breakwater, for storms often sweep wildly across the broad waters. This is the chief settlement of the lake district, the Highland Scottish inhabitants having twisted its present name out of the original French title of Bedique, there being a population of about one thousand. At the eastern extremity of Cape Breton Island, on an inlet from the Atlantic, and near the terminating arms of the Bras d'Or, is the coal-shipping port of Sydney, with a population of twenty-five hundred, though excepting coal-piers and colliers there is not much there to see. This is the port for the Sydney coal-fields, covering nearly three hundred square miles of the island, and the mine-galleries being prolonged in various places under the ocean. These were the first coal deposits worked in America, the French having got coal out of them in the seventeenth century. They are now all controlled by the wealthy Dominion Coal Company of Boston. Sydney, C. B., is a seaport known from its coaling facilities throughout the world, and while prosaic enough now, it saw stirring scenes in the Colonial times. The early name for its admirable harbor was Spanish Bay, because Spanish fishermen gathered there. It was a favorite anchorage for both French and English fleets in their preparations, as the tide of battle turned, for attacking New England or Acadia in the long struggle for supremacy. In 1696 the French assembled in Spanish Bay for a foray upon Pemaquid. In 1711 Admiral Hovenden Walker, returning from his unsuccessful expedition against Quebec, his ships having been dispersed by a storm, collected in this capacious roadstead the most formidable fleet it had seen, forty-two vessels. The doughty British Admiral felt so good about it that he set up on shore a large signboard made by his carpenters, whereon was inscribed a pompous proclamation claiming possession of the whole country in honor of his sovereign Queen Anne. The French soon came along, however, and smashed his signboard, built their fortress of Louisbourg, and there was a half-century of warfare before the proclamation was made good and England had undisputed possession. The settlement on Spanish Bay was not named after Lord Sydney and made the Cape Breton capital until 1784, when exiled loyalists came from the United States to inhabit it.

THE GREAT ACADIAN FORTRESS.

Upon the seacoast, twenty-five miles southeast of Sydney, is a low headland with a dark rocky island in the offing. This headland is Cape Breton, originally named for the Breton French fishermen who frequented it, and it in turn named Cape Breton Island. Just west of Cape Breton is an admirable harbor which, being frequented in the early days by English fishermen, the French named the Havre aux Anglais, or the "English Port." Upon Point Rochefort, on its western side, stood the famous French fortress and town of Louisbourg, which was called "the Dunkirk of America." While grass-grown ruins and some of the ramparts are still traceable, and visitors find relics, yet little is left of this great fortress, once regarded as the "Key to New France," or of the populous French town on the harbor which in the eighteenth century had a trade of the first importance. It was twice captured, after remarkable sieges and battles of world-wide renown, causing the most profound sensations at the time, and now absolutely nothing is left of the original place but an old graveyard on the point, where French and English dust commingle in peace under a mantle of dark greensward. There is at present a settlement of about a thousand people around the harbor, mainly engaged in the fisheries. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 transferred Newfoundland and Acadia from France to England, but the French held Cape Breton Island, and many of their refugees came hither. It was not long before the French King, Louis XIV., stirred by Admiral Walker's proclamation and anxious about Canada, determined to fortify the "English Port" and make a commercial depot there, and in 1714 the plan was laid out, the name being changed to Louisbourg. In 1720 work began on a prodigious scale, the intention being to make it the leading fortress in America, and for more than twenty years France devoted its energy and resources to the completion of the stupendous fortifications, attracting inhabitants to the place by bounties, and creating a brisk trade by sea which soon drew inhabitants for a large town. When completed, this town stood upon the neck of land on the southwest side of the harbor enclosed by stone walls having a circuit of nearly three miles. These walls were thirty-six feet high and forty feet thick at the base, with a ditch outside eighty feet wide. The fortress was constructed in the first system of the noted French engineer, Vauban, and required a large garrison. A battery of thirty guns was located on Goat Island, at the harbor entrance, and at the bottom of the harbor opposite the entrance was another, the Royal Battery, also of thirty guns. The land and harbor sides of the town were defended by ramparts and bastions on which eighty guns were mounted, the land side also having a deep moat and projecting bastions, the West Gate on that side being overlooked by a battery of sixteen guns. There was a ponderous Citadel, and in the centre of the town the stately stone church of St. John de Dieu, with attendant nunnery and hospitals. The streets crossed at right angles, and five gates in the walls on the harbor side communicated with the wharves. Such was the greatest stronghold in North America in 1745, the famous Louisbourg fortress.

The people of New England, whose commerce was being preyed upon by privateers which found refuge in its harbor, and whose frontiers were harassed by forays thence directed, we are told by the historian, "looked with awe upon the sombre walls of Louisbourg, whose towers rose like giants above the northern seas." But the Puritans were not wont to lie still under such inflictions, nor to confine their efforts to prayers alone. Massachusetts planned an attack, and the command of the expedition was given William Pepperell of Kittery, a merchant ignorant of the art of war. Then followed one of the most extraordinary events in history. A fleet of about a hundred vessels carried a force of forty-one hundred undisciplined militia upon a Puritan crusade, which was started with religious services, the eloquent preacher, George Whitefield, imploring a blessing and giving them the motto, Nil desperandum, Christo duce. They rendezvoused at Canso, meeting there Commodore Warren and the British West Indian fleet by arrangement, and landing at Gabarus Bay, west of Louisbourg, April 30, 1745. They did not know much about war, but they set fire to some storehouses, and the black smoke drove down in such volumes upon the Royal Battery at the bottom of the harbor that its scared French defenders spiked the guns and fled in the night. The Puritans took possession, beat off the French who attacked them, got smiths at work, who drilled out the spikes, and soon from this, the key to the position, they turned the guns upon the town. Then began a regular siege, though most unscientific in manner. They captured a French ship with stores and reinforcements, and by June had breached the walls twenty-four feet at the King's Bastion, dismounted all the neighboring guns, made the Goat Island Battery untenable, and ruined the town by showers of bombs and red-hot balls. Upon June 15th the British fleet of ten ships was drawn up off the harbor entrance for an attack, and the land forces were arrayed to assault the West Gate, when the French commander, knowing he could hold out no longer, decided to surrender, and on June 17th, the forty-ninth day of the siege, he capitulated.

Thus the grand fortress fell, as the Puritan historian describes it, upon the attack of "four thousand undisciplined militia or volunteers, officered by men who had, with one or two exceptions, never seen a shot fired in anger in all their lives, encamped in an open country and sadly deficient in suitable artillery." He continues: "As the troops, entering the fortress, beheld the strength of the place, their hearts for the first time sank within them. 'God has gone out of his way,' said they, 'in a remarkable and most miraculous manner, to incline the hearts of the French to give up and deliver this strong city into our hands.'" The capture was the marvel of the time, and caused the greatest rejoicings throughout the British Empire; while Pepperell, who was made a Baronet, attributed his success, not to the guns nor the ships, but to the constant prayers of New England, daily arising from every village in behalf of the absent army. This victory at Louisbourg gave them an experience to which is attributed the American success at Bunker Hill thirty years afterwards. Colonel Gridley, who planned Pepperell's batteries, is said to have laid out the hastily constructed entrenchments on Bunker Hill, and the same old drums that beat in the siege of Louisbourg were at Bunker Hill, the spirit which this great victory imparted to the Yankee soldiers having never deteriorated.

The French were terribly chagrined at the loss of their great fortress, and in 1746 they sent out the "French Armada" of seventy ships under the Duc d'Anville, instructed to "occupy Louisbourg, reduce Nova Scotia, destroy Boston, and ravage the coast of New England." But storms wrecked and dispersed the fleet, and the vexed and disappointed commander died of apoplexy, his Vice-Admiral killing himself. Then a second expedition of forty-four ships was sent under La Jonquiere to retake Louisbourg, but the English squadrons attacked and destroyed this fleet off Cape Finisterre, Admirals Warren and Anson gaining one of the greatest British naval victories of the eighteenth century. The fortress which thus could not be retaken by arms was, however, to the general astonishment, surrendered back to France by diplomacy. The peace of Aix la Chapelle in 1748 ended the war by restoring Louisbourg and Cape Breton Island to France, and the historian bluntly records that "after four years of warfare in all parts of the world, after all the waste of blood and treasure, the war ended just where it began." France then rebuilt, improved and strengthened the idolized fortress, sending it a powerful garrison.

War was renewed in 1755,—the terrible French and Indian War. Halifax was then the base of British-American operations, and fleets soon blockaded Louisbourg. The French had twelve warships in the harbor and ten thousand men in the garrison, but the British, bewailing the shortsightedness that gave it up by treaty, were bound to retake it at all hazards. They sent a fleet of one hundred and fifty-six warships and transports from Spithead, the most powerful England had down to that time assembled, carrying thirteen thousand six hundred men, with Admiral Boscawen commanding the navy and General Amherst the army, the immortal Wolfe being one of the brigadiers. Rendezvousing at Halifax, this great force sailed against Louisbourg May 28, 1758, the troops landing at Gabarus Bay, and beginning the attack June 8th, with Wolfe leading. The French commander sank five of his warships to blockade the harbor entrance. Wolfe closely followed Pepperell's method, got batteries in position to bombard the city, and silenced the Goat Island Battery by his tremendous cannonade. In time he had destroyed the West Gate, the Citadel and barracks, and burnt three of the French ships by his red-hot balls. Two more ships ran out of the harbor in a fog to escape, and one was captured. Two French frigates alone remained, and a daring attack in boats was made on these, and both were destroyed. Breaches were rent in the walls, so that the place became untenable, and finally, after forty-eight days of terrific siege, Louisbourg, on July 26th, again surrendered to the British. Then more rejoicings came throughout the Empire, Wolfe was made a Major General, and the gain to ocean commerce by the downfall of the fortress, which had been a refuge for privateers, was seen in an immediate decline in marine insurance rates from thirty to twelve per cent. The next year the great British fleet and army sailed away from Louisbourg under Wolfe for the capture of Quebec and the final conquest of Canada. Then went forth the edict of the conqueror that the famous French fortress should be utterly destroyed. It was found as a seaport to be inferior to Halifax, where the admirable harbor is never closed by ice, and where the forts could make the place impregnable. The Louisbourg garrison was withdrawn, and the people scattered, many going to Sydney. All the guns, stores and everything valuable went to Halifax. In 1760 a corps of sappers and miners worked six months, demolishing the fortifications and buildings, overthrowing the walls and glacis into the ditches, leaving nothing standing but a few small half-ruined private houses, and thus the proud Acadian fortress was humbled into heaps of rubbish. The merciful hand of time, left to complete the ruin, has during the centuries healed most of the ghastly wounds with its generous mantle of greensward, and the neighboring ocean sounds along the low shores the eternal requiem of proud Louisbourg.

THE MAGDALEN ISLANDS.

We have come to the uttermost verge of the Continent in quest of "Down East," and find it elusive and still beyond us. There is yet the remote island of Newfoundland, and we are pointed thither as still "Down East." To the northward, lying in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, are the group of Magdalen Islands, where a steamer calls once a week, sailing from Pictou, these probably being about as far away as one would wish to go in his search. There are thirteen in the group, sixty miles off the extremity of Cape Breton Island, the bleak Cape North. Acadian fishermen live there, the population being about three thousand, and New England fishery fleets visit them for cod, mackerel and seals, with lobsters and sea-trout also abundant, so that these islands have come to be called in the Provinces the "Kingdom of Fish." Amherst Island is the chief, having the village and Custom House, the surface of this and other islands rising in high hills seen from afar. Coffin Island is the largest of the group, named after Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin, the original owner. Coffin was a native of Boston, and in colonial times a distinguished British naval officer. When he was a Captain he took Governor General Lord Dorchester to Canada in his frigate, and designing to enter the St. Lawrence, a furious storm arose. With skill he saved his vessel by managing to get under the lee of these islands, which broke the force of the gale, and Lord Dorchester in gratitude procured the grant of the group for Coffin. There are also the Bird Isles, two bare rocks of sandstone, the principal one called the Gannet Rock. These are haunted by immense numbers of sea-birds, whose eggs the islanders gather. The surf dashes violently against the gaunt rocks on all sides, and they have been visited by the greatest naturalists of the world, who found them a most interesting study. A lighthouse is erected on one of them. Charlevoix, in 1720, recorded his visit here, and his wonder how "in such a multitude of nests every bird immediately finds her own." It is also recorded of this remote region that it, too, is a colonizer, the people of the Magdalen Islands having established three small but prosperous colonies over on the Labrador shore. Outlying the group to the westward, eight miles from Amherst, is the desolate rock, resembling a corpse prepared for burial, known as Deadman's Isle. Tom Moore sailed past this gruesome place in 1804, and wrote the poem making it famous: